Have you ever had a digital pizza? I always order mine with 8-bit cheese and a side of high-definition video sauce. The green pixels are a crunchy treat.
This is not a new feature in the latest, greatest online role-playing game, nor some scheme by Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) to ship a New York-style cheese pie to your doorstep overnight. Thank goodness for that. All kidding aside, the real-life pizza rivalry between Papa John's (Nasdaq: PZZA) and Domino's (NYSE: DPZ) is moving into the digital domain.
Papa John's is turning to leading online destination Facebook to shift some dough. Sign up as a Facebook fan of the Papa John's brand, and you get a coupon for a free pizza. The press release mentions an existing fan base of more than 10,000 Facebook users, but the total now stands at more than 140,000. There's nothing like free food to help you make new friends.
Now, Domino's already has 140,000 Facebook fans (and Yum! Brands' (NYSE: YUM) Pizza Hut boasts more than 382,000 semi-official fan club members), but it looks like Johnny Boy is picking up steam here. So what does Domino's do? Give digital video specialist TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) a call, of course.
TiVo users will be able to respond to TV ads for Domino's specials with a single click of the remote; within 30 minutes, they'll have a hot pizza delivered to their doorstep. All the ordering takes place on your TV screen, including crust choices and the delivery address. If I've learned one thing about the American consumer, it is that convenience really is king. For the pizzeria chain, this move puts the pies in temptingly easy reach for several million couch potatoes. TiVo gets to add another quirky and potentially customer-winning feature to a long list of achievements, which includes Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) video streams and integration with Research In Motion's (Nasdaq: RIMM) BlackBerry platform.
My introduction was tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the reality is that our online lives are starting to mingle with the real world in ways that would have sounded ludicrous a decade ago. All of the big pizza guys let you buy pizza online or from your cell phone (without actually talking to anyone), and Pizza Hut even has a Facebook application that does the job.
Virtual reality is not a joke or a geeky hobby anymore. It's becoming a seamless part of actual reality. Enjoy that high-def deep-dish, dude.
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